Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum
How did Proulx a many times married lady get into the heads of 2 gay men
Front-Ranger:
Here is a little of Annie Proulx's explanation of her work in an interview for The Missouri Review:
--- Quote ---Interviewer: Do you have a standard operating procedure in the way you work? Do you start with place, or history, or character and story, or is it different with each book?
Proulx: Where a story begins in the mind I am not sure—a memory of haystacks, maybe, or wheel ruts in the ruined stone, the ironies that fall out of the friction between past and present, some casual phrase overheard. But something kicks in, some powerful juxtaposition, and the whole book shapes itself up in the mind. I spend a year or two on the research and I begin with the place and what happened there before I fill notebooks with drawings and descriptions of rocks, water, people, names. I study photographs. From place come the characters, the way things happen, the story itself. For the sake of architecture, of balance, I write the ending first and then go to the beginning.
Interviewer: What's your approach to research?
Proulx: The research is ongoing and my great pleasure. Since geography and climate are intensely interesting to me, much time goes into the close examination of specific regions—natural features of the landscape, human marks on it, earlier and prevailing economics based on raw materials, ethnic background of settlers.
Interviewer: Where do you go for that kind of information?
Proulx: I read manuals of work and repair, books of manners, dictionaries of slang, city directories, lists of occupational titles, geology, regional weather, botanists' plant guides, local histories, newspapers. I visit graveyards, collapsing cotton gins, photograph barns and houses, roadways. I listen to ordinary people speaking with one another in bars and stores, in laundromats. I read bulletin boards, scraps of paper I pick up from the ground. I paint landscapes because staring very hard at a place for twenty to thirty minutes and putting it on paper burns detail into the mind as no amount of scribbling can do.
--- End quote ---
Artiste:
Oh... quelle comme quelle surprise comme si Annie est ma grand-maman !!
J'ai maintenant un sourire!
En y pensant!!
Au revoir,
hugs!
Artiste:
Optom (Fiona):
what wonderful thread subject you created:
How did Proulx a many times married lady get into the heads of 2 gay men
........
It's so interesting!
Au revoir, hugs!
Artiste:
May I say that we must NOT forget that Annie is a Canadienne-francaise , yes one quebecoise lady, in many ways!!
It is therefore, in her nature to be observant that way... it seems to me.
One of my grand-maman was like Annie, very much so!!
When grand-maman and I went walking, she always found money on the ground!! Really, a penny, five cents or more!!
Maybe, that is why that I am like her and Annie... picking up pieces of paper on the soil to see what it is and how that tells a story or a clue to one possibly ??
Au revoir Annie,
hugs!!
Artiste:
Clyde, may we read your letter she sent you??
May I ask ??
Au revoir,
hugs!!
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